[Sigia-l] merits of bullets (was Smackdown: Edward Tufte vs.DonNorman)

[Eric Scheid]

On 1/6/05 9:58 PM, "Terence Nelan" <TNelan at modemmedia.com> wrote:

> By extention, writing a good short summary (bulleted or not) of any
> longer, complicated text that communicates  essential points to a busy
> person - is going to require similar excellent writing skills and
> mastery of the material. I'm pretty sure we agree there, as well.
> 
> Furthermore, this is a clearly a valuable skill, if we want to
> communicate with the stereotypical CEO.

Not necessarily. The film industry employs people who take complete scripts,
reads them, and then produce one page summaries. They typically have very
little skill in creating scripts themselves, which is why they work as
readers.

Can a movie be boiled down to just a few bullet points? Yes. Is that
sufficient to know if it's a good script or not? Going by the number of
crappy productions with god-awful dialog which are rip-offs of much better
scripts, I'm not so sure. Are there good productions with fantastic dialog
but otherwise mundane plots? Yes.

Is the world flooded with huge blockbusters with execrable dialog and
uninspired acting? How many of those were commissioned by very busy CEOs?

e.